The Open-Mesh Revolution

Posted by
Sam Churchill
on
March 11th, 2008

A year ago, the $50 Meraki WiFi repeater looked like a revolution — an ideal solution for bridging the digital divide. Then Meraki Jacked Up the Price and stripped the low cost unit of most of its features (FAQ). The standard edition now doesn’t allow billing, user authentication, access control or a custom splash page. You’ll have to pay $100 more per node for most of features that previously came “free”. Meraki is now pushing advertising via their Hosted Services.

It pissed off a lot of people.

Many organizations, such as Net Equality (now a part of One Economy), utilized Meraki to provide cheap or free internet access for low income housing. They were left twisting in the wind by Meraki’s change of direction.

You plug one into your DSL or other Internet connection and put additional mini-routers where you want Internet access to extend the WiFi range (each router should be within 100 feet of another router). They like Covad because they support WiFi sharing but other broadband providers can be used. Open-Mesh doesn’t have a business relationship with broadband providers

The router comes with a 2dbi antenna and Ethernet cable to connect to your DSL or computer. It uses the same Atheros chipset used in the Meraki.

ROBIN (ROuting Batman Inside) is an Open Source mesh network project, deployed on top of OpenWRT. It uses the BATMAN routing algorithm (Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.

“We’re not trying to get rich”, said Michael Burmeister-Brown in a phone conversation with DailyWireless this morning. “We hope other companies and manufacturers will pick up on the open source ROBIN sofware and include it in their hardware”, explained Burmeister-Brown.

The mission of Open-Mesh is to support community wireless, education, and the developing world using open source WiFi mesh networking. Simple. Cheap. Ad free. Do it yourself.